4,000m2 Installation of Shrink-wrap for Iconic Water Tower Restoration

Shrink-wrap for Restoration Project

Tufcoat was awarded the contract to wrap the scaffolding surrounding Chatterton Water Tower, the iconic building in Spalding, as part of a £445 million pound regional program by Anglian Water.

Main contractor Barhale requested shrink-wrap for restoration of the existing paintwork to protect the surrounding area and properties from any damage from cleaning and painting works.

Chatterton Water Tower is renowned in the area due to its’ sheer size, terracotta and white paintwork with Tulip motifs which celebrated the region’s vast tulip production heritage. One of nine water towers in the East Lincolnshire area, the tower was originally painted in 1997, however, in the last five years, the tower’s appearance had drawn local criticism.

Mick Cox, South Lincolnshire Supply Manager for Anglian Water, said: “We’re really excited to be getting started on the facelift. We know this project is important to the local community, and we’re pleased to be able to restore the iconic water tower’s paintwork to its 1997 condition. The facelift was promised three years ago during conversations with the council. We listened to what customers had to say then, and it’s now going ahead having been incorporated into our 2017/18 investment programme.

“Across the region, we will spend nearly £445million pounds over the course of the year. Millions of which will be spent in Spalding, maintaining and improving the water and sewerage networks – including the repainting of Chatterton Tower.”

Interserve began erecting scaffold in March around the 29m quadrilateral tower over a six-week period, using over 180 tonnes of tube & fitting scaffolding and a further 70 tonnes of boards to create the working lifts to enable conservation to get underway to contain any debris created during the steam cleaning of the original paintwork and subsequent repainting in the original colour scheme.

With the four elevations surface area in excess of 3900m² Tufcoat shrink-wrap installers were required to work to a strict program not only to ensure that no delay was incurred to the painting schedule but also because the teams were working behind Interserve wrapping the structure from the bottom up.

Standard practice would be to install shrink-wrap from the upper lifts of a structure like this to enable the creation of water run-offs at each drop, typically every third lift.

In this instance, the focus of the project was not weather protection but environmental containment and as such the team worked from the ground up installing our LPS1215 300µm flame retardant shrink-wrap in less than ten days and ahead of our schedule which was a testament to our installations team.

Ian Lewis, Project Engineer for Barhale commented “because this was a painting operation we specified shrink-wrap to contain any paint overspray due to the proximity to a large public carpark and the potential damage which could be caused to public property.

I’m very pleased with the quality and speed of Tufcoat’s installation teams, initially, we expected the shrink-wrap program to take two weeks but the project was wrapped in just over a week with teams working over the weekend to complete the four elevations and the shrink-wrap has done just the job.”

Due to the nature of the tower, providing a storage head for clean, fresh water which serves over 22,000 properties in the Spalding area, the project required an installation team with National Water Hygiene Training. 

Tufcoat invested in the installation teams to carry EUSR cards by Energy & Utility Skills Register over the last two years enabling us not only work within the water industry but also gas and power sectors.